Private school teachers raise salary issue ahead of academic year

AMMAN — With the new school year approaching, private school teachers are urging the Ministry of Education to “take serious measures” against any school that has not yet abided by the mandatory regulation of paying its employees through the bank.

Last year, the “Stand with the Teacher” campaign, which shed light on the fact that some private schools pay teachers less than the minimum wage or refrain from paying altogether, caused Prime Minister Omar Razzaz to act on the matter.

In August of last year, the Prime Ministry passed a new by-law that mandated the bank payment of all private school teachers.

However, the campaign has once again taken to Twitter to announce that “more than 300 private schools are still not abiding by that law”, as put by a statement posted on Sunday.

Teacher Mona Doghmi, who is one of the campaign members, said that they have “submitted a paper with names of at least 200 schools whose teachers have filed complaints concerning this matter, but the ministry has not taken any measures to close or even warn them”.

Minister of Education Walid Maani replied to one of the teachers on Twitter, saying that “the government is very serious regarding this regulation. So is the ministry”.

Numerous replies by teachers to the minister contained complaints against their own schools, but the minister has not replied to them.

The campaign attached to its earlier statement a detailed report that listed “gaps” in the regulation that private schools use to avoid abiding by it, such as the “absence of a serious fine” and a “missing, unspecified timeframe for closures after a school has been warned about the issue”.

The ministry, however, through its spokesperson Walid Jallad said that “if any school does not abide by the regulation as of the 2019-2020 academic year, its licence will be revoked and it will be closed within a week”.